Inherited Identity and Chosen Identity

Finding Meaning Between the Given and the Made

During a recent workshop I led on AI for a major bank I was asked about my biggest fears concerning AI and work. The obvious answer was massive disruption due to large scale job loss, which has already started. But I said ‘the decline of natural intelligence’ and making sure you have other interests, hobbies outside of work. It is important to build “an identity separate from your work” and do things that give you meaning.

Let me explain the latter.

There are two words that sound like they're trapped in the footnotes of an academic paper but deserve front-page status in any serious account of how we find meaning: filiation and affiliation. One is thrust upon you; the other is yours to make. One is an accident of birth, the other a declaration of intent. They are deceptively quiet terms, the sort that seem to be muttered in anthropological conferences, yet their distinction shapes how we build lives worth living.

Filiation is your name, your hometown, your handed-down rituals, assigned at birth and confirmed by the bureaucracies of family, habit, and inherited taste. It gives you a starting point. But while it provides a foundation, filiation alone rarely answers the deeper call to define oneself. It is how you are categorized before you contribute. The Friday-night fish and chips, the cricket bat in the garage, the dusty piano no one plays but everyone dusts. These are filiative anchors. They don’t ask questions. They persist.

Affiliation, by contrast, is elective. It’s the stuff of obsessions and enthusiasms. You affiliate with indie theatre troupes that stage Brecht in church basements, or you become a connoisseur of obscure Japanese jazz. Your friends think it’s odd that you wake up at 3 a.m. to watch baseball from another continent, or that you can name every discontinued LEGO set since 1984. But that’s affiliation: joy with a backbone.

A friend of mine regularly attends weekend flea markets and collects vintage Soviet wristwatches. He is not Russian. He does not speak the language. But there he is, every Saturday and Sunday, explaining the difference between a Vostok Amphibia and a Raketa Copernicus like a priest discussing relics. His family thinks it is strange. I think it is devotion.

Our hobbies, our fandoms, our niche fascinations. These are not just pastimes; they are quiet affiliations. They signal who we choose to be when no one is assigning us roles. A schoolteacher joins a medieval reenactment society on weekends. A retired engineer begins building violins. These gestures are small, and sincere. They are not born of obligation but of pursuit.

There’s a kind of romance to affiliation.

Filiation offers identity without effort, but affiliation demands curiosity. You can join the wrong group. You can obsess over the wrong decade. You can find yourself explaining the appeal of 1970s Turkish psychedelic rock to a room full of people who politely wish you wouldn’t. But that risk is part of the thrill. Affiliation is not a safe inheritance; it’s a bold detour.

In my own life, I’ve watched filiation and affiliation play an intricate game. My early taste in books was filiative, selected directly from the shelves of older relatives. Yet the things I love now? Found in antique book shops, suggested by strangers, stumbled upon in late-night online book reviews. No one in my family listened to klezmer music or restored antique cameras. That part of me, as a young adult, was self-made.

We talk a lot about belonging these days. And affiliation is how we get there, not just through ancestry, but through affection. The fan who paints her face in team colours before every match, the couple who spend their weekends hunting for vinyl in secondhand stores, the teenager who starts baking elaborate cakes because they saw it on TV and then fell in love with the chemistry. These are not idle hobbies. They are commitments.

The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah speaks of cosmopolitanism as a kind of ethical affiliation, a way of being connected not through sameness, but through chosen interests. It is a lovely idea. But it starts small. It starts with who you sit next to in a pottery class. It starts with a shared laugh over a rare comic book.

Filiation tells you where you began. But only affiliation can tell you what you truly value. And while the world might not recognize your passion for vintage toy trains or your encyclopedic knowledge of Welsh rugby, those things matter. They are the fingerprints of your agency.

To affiliate is to make meaning in the margins. It’s to say, “I know what I inherited, but let me show you what I found.”

Stay curious

Colin